Fleecing Victims: "Self-aware" "Narcissists" Online (Prosocial Communal Compilation)

In my channel, I don't function as a self-aware narcissist. My channel is academic. I present to you research findings in 90% of the cases. That's all.

I don't interact with you the way these self-aware narcissists interact with you. They create a personal rapport with you. They share with you their private lives. They become your best friends.

Some of them pretend to be victims of narcissistic abuse. They are actually dangerous, covert narcissists, psychopathic status.

And yet you pity them and you love them and they're amazing and they're soft and they're so in need of protection and so.

And we all know who we are talking about. Self-style experts and coaches and whatever.

The environment of online narcissism, the environment of online coaches and so on who deal with narcissism is contaminated to the core. It's effluence. It's a sewage. It's a sewer.

You need to be very careful before you wade into these waters. Because they can cause you very serious damage. You have been worn.

And now, if you want to delve deeper into what makes these people tick, watch this video.

I did my best for you right now, right here in this video. The rest is up to you.

It's called the Karpman Drama Triangle. Karpman Drama Triangle.

It's a rescuer, abuser, and victim.

Carpman says that the roles change all the time, they shift.

So a victim could become an abuser, an abuser can become rescuer, and so on so forth.

He said that the roles are not fixed.

But yeah, you have these saviors, healers, fixers, rescuer types. And they're actually mostly narcissistic. They're very grandiose, they're covert, so you can't see them coming.

They hide behind a facade of empathy and compassion and altruism and charity and healthfulness and succor.

And they're the most wonderful people on earth and they're saintly almost, you know, but actually behind the facade, there's a predator, a dangerous predator, who has no boundaries, is unboundaried, and who has no moral compunction and no moral compass, a predator who would do anything, like anything, totally antisocial.

I have been 26 years in this racket so of course I've seen quite a few of actually I had onein my life until recently.

The sun is playing tricks on us.

He was a guy I used to hang out with. We broke up after an incredible incident of egregious bedmouthing and backstabbing.

So a lot of what I say in this video, in this interview, it's based on this rotten character, you know.

So saviors are very often perfidious, fake friends.

Many of them are people pleasers, actually. They always claim to be helpless and defenseless.

Victim stunts, you know, they're always victims of manipulation and abuse, and they're so childlike in their vulnerability and so in need oh so in need of love and of course women lap it up they lap it up they love it they they see a love deficit and they just want to plug in and fulfill it and that is the secret sauce of saviors and rescuers.

Because remember, as I said, saviors, healers, fixers, rescuers, they're grandiose. They're covert, they're fake, And they're definitely predatory.

They often move around in couples, like the savior rescuer type, would team up with someone who is a lot less fake. Someone who is honest, straightforward, no nonsense, doesn't do sweet talk, never pretends, and never lies.

And so in comparison to this backdrop, in comparison to this wingman, the savior or the rescuer appears to be empathic, compassionate, altruistic, loving, caring, even saintly.

It's this contrast. They create this contrast.

It's a problem. It's a problem. It's a problem because you can't see them coming.

These savior-rescuer types, like this guy that I mentioned, they're snakes in the grass. They masquerade as good people, but they actually engage all the time in perfidy and betrayal and, and backstabbing, and bedmouthing, and so on.

Because to pose as a savior or to pose as a rescuer, you have to cast someone as an abuser. You can't be a savior if there's no abuser.

So they go around labeling people, abusers and so on so forth.

But in reality, most of these saviors and rescuers who are usually men, they're rabidly misogynistic. Some of them I think are latent homosexuals or closet gays. They're narcissistic and they're psychopathic in the dating scene, for example. They're players, actually. Most of them are players.

And the pickup line of these people is, I am a savior of damsels in distress. They're self-appointed, of course.

And their saving and rescuing is self-imputed. It's nonsense and bullshit. It disguises predatory practices.

But they go around picking up vulnerable, heartbroken, sad, crying women and telling them, I'm going to save you from the bad, mentally ill, dangerous, damaging abuser that you're with. I'm the alternative to the horrors of your relationship.

But often, as Karpman correctly observes, it is the savior who is the abuser, not the so-called abuser.

Carpman says that these roles are not fixed. They crucially depend on play-acting circumstances, interpersonal dynamics, and so on so forth.

So very often saviors and rescuers are predators and abusers masquerading as saviors and rescuers.

So they go to venues where you can find such women. I don't know, bars, dating apps, restaurants, but they home in, they zero in on heartbroken, sad, damaged, crying, devastated, anxious and depressed women as targets wherever they may be. It could be a dinner. It could be an intimate dinner with friends.

This happened to me. This savior type, he picked up a girl at a dinner, you know.

These women need to talk, they need to share, they can't be alone, they can't face being alone. Immediately, for example, after a breakup, or after a big fight with a partner. They can't face being alone. They just need to talk, but they end up being prey, sexual or otherwise.

The savior or the rescuer just stigmatizes and labels someone as an abuser. They just pick up any guy? And they would label him an abuser.

It often is actually a friend or a colleague, because these are the easiest, most available targets.

So they would go around, they would talk to your, they would pretend to be your friend, and then they would talk to your wife or to your girlfriend, and would convince her that you're an abuser and they can save her.

They are fake friends. They are seething with envy and resentment owing to deep-set inferiority complex.

Saving, rescuing, this operation makes them feel omnipotent, empowers them. You know, they feel godlike. It's mythical, it's almost mythological. It's almost like King Arthur legends, you know, they are the knight on shining armor and they are saving damsels in distress from the monsters that lurk in relationships.

The abuser could be anyone, so I'm telling you. That's not the point.

Of course, some women are subjected to abuse in relationships.

But the savior and rescuer is a predator. He's not really interested in the woman or in her relationship, or in her woes, or in the problems that she's having, or in her state of mind, or in the abuser, they couldn't care less.

They hate women. Most of them absolutely detest women and hold them in deep contempt. They want to hurt women. They are dangerous sadistic predators. They're rabid misogynists, as I told you.

So they bedmouth. Even if you are best friend with them, they bedmouth you. They betray your confidences for hours to other people.

And of course, being grandiose, they don't realize that their words are reported back to the so-called abuser.

For example, this guy and me, I had information from multiple sources about how he is bedmouthing me and egregiously backstabbing me.

I would introduce him to women and then he would take them aside or fix an appointment with him or have a date with them and he would go on and on and on for hours, bedmouthing me, trying to convince him to not be with me.

But I refuse to believe it because he was that good at faking. He's a consummate fake. He's been fake all his life, I assume. He had to be fake to survive.

Saviours and rescuers attempt to create alliances or coalitions with victims against abusers.

But often the abuser is actually not an abuser.

So that's what I said. For example, there's a fight. There's a fight. A couple has a fight.

The Savior would plug himself in and convince the woman that she's being abused.

Or there's a breakup. Hours after the breakup, the Savior would date that woman and sleep with her.

That's the pattern.

I call it the predatory three, the predatory three essays.

I'm going to save you, I'm going to have sex with you, and then I'm going to scram, pretending to be altruistic.

So like save sex scram, the three essences of the predatory savior and rescuer.

I'm going to pretend to save you. I'm going to be a friend. I'm going to be your shelter and refuge and sanctuary and respite. I'm going to be there for you, I'm going to listen to you for hours, and you can cry on my shoulder, I'm going to understand you and accept you, I'm going to calm you down, ameliorate your anxiety and everything, all this in order to end up having sex with you.

And then once I've had sex with you and arouse your sympathy and so there's a connection. I will scram. I just run away. And I will tell you you don't need another fantasy or you are not ready for a relationship or such other bullshit like this.

This is what rescuers and savior types do.

It's a highly narcissistic behavior. It's selfish. It's egotistical. It's a highly narcissistic behavior.

It's selfish. It's egotistical. It's predatory. It's exploitative. It's horrible because it leaves the victim of abuse, if she is indeed a victim of abuse, it leaves her much more broken than before. It leaves her even more devastated. She used and re-traumatized second time.

Depends if they're narcissistic.

If they're narcissistic, yes, they believe their own lies. They believe, they have this fantasy of themselves. It's a grandiose fantasy of themselves.

As saviors and rescuers, and they believe their own lies and confabulations.

It is their job, so to speak, self-assigned mission in life to save women from men.

It's splitting. They choose a target, let's say a good friend, a colleague, a neighbor, they choose a target, they make the target all bad, all black, an abuser. And then by comparison, they're all good, and that is splitting.

It caters to their grandiosity, but they have unboundaried sexual needs.

They have no moral compass. They have no moral compass.

They would sleep, they would poach your wife, they would poach your girlfriend, they would do anything. They don't care. There's no boundaries, no guiding behavior, no codes, no nothing. They are utter, unmitigated, feral, savage predators.

Yes, I think I can generalize and say that all, everything I've just said is based on this character, this guy in my life, but I've seen others, of course, in action.

And yes, I can generalize and say that all savior rescuer types are like that.

They are like that, absolutely. No, he is not an exception, and it's not because I'm angry at him.

I am angry at him, but I'm sufficiently detached.

Yes, this is the profile of a rescuer or savior.

And any woman who has gone through this cycle will confirm what I'm saying.

Any woman, ask anyone who has had this triangle of abuser, rescue her savior, ask her what the self-appointed rescuer saviordid to her.

Did he or did he not have sex with her hours after she appealed for help?

For example, yeah, we can move on to the next topic.

Absolutely. But I still want to the next topic. Absolutely.

But I still want to say a few things.

But it's not about him.

It's about this phenomenon of narcissistic saviors, narcissistic rescuers, narcissistic healers and fixers, narcissistic gurus, narcissistic coaches.

Narcissists are everywhere. They have taken over the helping professions. They are among therapies as well.

It's very dangerous what's happening.

Because narcissists and psychopaths infiltrated victimhood movements, self-help activities, forums online, and they're all over the place, and they are in control of the agenda.

That's not me. These are studies in British Columbia in 2020, studies by Gabba, Y.

These studies clearly showed that victimhood movements, self-help movements are being infiltrated by narcissists and psychopaths, especially covert narcissists.

Covert narcissists are the most dangerous in this sense because again you can't see them coming and when they strike it's sudden it's disorienting it's disconcerting it's destructive it's a horrible experience I can tell you from personal experience the last few weeks, but it's an absolutely horrible experience.

Because a sense of betrayal is profound.

You want to believe in the good of other people. You know, you want to believe that the world is good, that people essentially are good.

And so it's a betrayal not only of you, but a betrayal of kind of cosmic justice or a betrayal of the order of the world.

It's destabilizing and unsettling and terrifying in many respects.

It's like everything is upended. You lose your ability to trust in people after something like this.

So these predatory rescuers who end up having sex with vulnerable, broken people, who end up abusing and exploiting people, you know, they're dangerous.

They're much more dangerous than overt open abusers.

They're much more dangerous than in your face, my way or the highway, narcissists and psychopaths.

Because you can defend yourself if you know that someone is a narcissist or someone, you can protect yourself if someone is a psychopath.

If you have the accurate information, you're safe.

But what do you do against people who pretend to be good people, empathic people, helpful, fake, the willingness to help, just in order then to kind of prey on you. What do you do with such people?

As a friend, as a lover, as a spouse, what do you do with such people? That's the issue.

And there's no good answer to this.

There's no good answer to this because our current civilization enables such people.

It gives them access to all kinds of technologies, empowering technologies.

And so their reach is much wider than ever before.

The danger cannot be overestimated.

I...

I...

Welcome back, Kiddos. And I'm calling you Kido's because I could be your great-great-great-grandfather.

Coming to think of it, maybe I actually am.

Now people have been asking me, do I have a single shirt? Like in every video I'm wearing the same shirt.

Well, of course I have a single shirt. I had to sell all my other shirts so that I can provide you with ad-free videos.

As you can see, if you look closely, I also had to sell my shaver. And that's why I have bristles. The next thing, I'm going to sell my eyeglasses, and then you're going to get some really, really weird videos coming.

So, having dispensed with this critical issue, which had been raised by many of you, like Freddy Kruger or like a Bitcoin, the man you all love to hate, me, he's back, Osam bin Vaknin.

Yesterday, Brookings Institute published an opinion poll. They asked 6,000 Americans whether they would wear masks. And a whopping 64% of their respondents said that they would not wear masks.

And when they were asked why they would not wear masks, they answered because it's my right as an American to not wear a mask.

And up until here, it's okay. It's debatable. You could argue with such people.

But then there was a twist.

They asked people, if by wearing a mask you would prevent someone's death. You wear a mask, someone gets his life back. You don't wear a mask, that guy or girl die. Someone's life is in your hands. Just by wearing a mask, you can save someone's life. Would you do that?

And the same 64% said, no way.

And then when they ask why, this is because masks are inconvenient.

Can you digest this?

64% of Americans in a relatively random sample, well, not exactly random, but not very far from random, 64% of Americans said that they're going to sacrifice someone's life. They don't care if someone dies as long as they feel convenient. The mask is inconvenient, so they're hell with other people's lives.

Now forget for a minute the issue of whether masks are needed, not needed, good, bad, helpful, not... That's not the issue at all.

The question here is narcissism. Eccentricity, taken to absolute extremes, bordering on psychopathy.

If I know that by inconveniencing myself, I would save one person's life, of course I would inconvenience myself.

But that's not the view of 64% of Americans.

I described this narcissists the first time in the year 2000. I was the first to describe this narcissists for a very simple reason. I was the only one discussing narcissism 20 years ago. There was no one else. So I had to come up with this subtype as well.

I noticed in my observations and correspondences and budding database of people diagnosed with NPD, I started to notice that some narcissists actually are charitable. They are givers. They are very helpful. They're very supportive. They afford succor. They are there for you.

I said to myself, this doesn't sit well with narcissism. How can I reconcile the two?

Narcissism is about not wearing a mask, even if someone were to die because of your inconvenience or convenience. Yet there is a group of narcissists, not too many, mind you, who would go to extremes, to extremes, to please and help other people.

And so I came up with the communal or pro-social narcissists, which is essentially an altruistic narcissist.

Now these narcissists, they use two, they use many, but they use two prominent psychological mechanisms.

One is known as confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when you filter information in a way that upholds and supports and buttresses, your prejudices, your biases, your deficits, your premonitions, your opinions, and your judgments, and your values. Anything that contradicts or confronts with these, you filter out, you ignore, you repress. That's confirmation bias.

And the second is called motivated reasoning. It's when you have a motivation to do something, and then you said yourself, why am I motivated to do this, and then you invent a whole story, you rationalize your motivation. You create, you intellectualize it, you create a narrative, which explains why you are doing what you do.

So before we go into the topic of altruism and narcissism, how can they sit together, how can they feed together, I would like to quote Richard Dawkins in his famous book, The God Delusion.

In the God Delusion, Dawkins quotes Amotz Zahavi. And he says, the Israeli zoologist Amotz Zahavi suggested that altruistic giving may be an advertisement of dominance and superiority. Anthropologists know it as the potlatch effect.

Only a genuinely superior individual can afford to advertise the fact by means of a costly gift. Through costly demonstrations of superiority, including ostentatious generosity and public-spirited risk-taking, this is how you establish your superiority.

If Zahavi is right, says Dawkins, conspicuous generosity is a way of buying unfakably authentic self-advertising.

Some narcissists are exactly this, ostentatiously, conspicuously, self-advertisingly, generous and charitable.

Look at me, look at me, look at me, look how good I am, look how loving I am, look how altruistic I am, look how kind and pleasing.

What sacrifices are making? They donate to charity. They lavish gifts on their closest. They abundantly provide for their nearest and dearest.

And in general, these narcissists are open-handed. They are unstintingly benevolent. One could even say compulsively benevolent.

Indeed, they have three types. And we'll discuss all three in this video.

The first one is the communal, pro-social altruistic narcissists.

The second one is a compulsive giver.

The third one is a pathological charmer, and a subtype of the pathological charmer is the people pleaser.

All these are forms of virtue signaling.

Virtue signaling is an act or a series of acts, or a pattern of behavior which signals to other people that you are virtuous, that you are benevolent, that you are benign, that you are helpful, that you are, you know, that you are a saint, in effect.

And recent studies in Colombia, in Canada, established a very strong link between virtual signaling and, hold your breath, psychopathy.

Psychopaths and narcissists engage in ostentatious virtual signaling.

Many political activists, shall I whisper, Black Lives Matter, many political activists, many politicians, many public intellectuals, many intellectuals, many politicians, many public intellectuals, many coaches, many humanity-loving experts or self-styled experts, they are constantly virtue signaling.

Look how much I love people, look how much I'm empathic, look how much I'm helping everyone.

This is virtue signaling. It's a strong indicator of actually underlying narcissistic psychopathy.

How can this be reconciled with a pronounced lack of empathyand the pernicious self-occupation that is so typical of narcissists?

I mean, ostensibly, if you are self-preoccupied, if you're egocentric, you can't be altruistic. These are mutually exclusive, no?

The act of giving enhances the narcissist's sense of omnipotence. If I give, it means I'm superior to you. I have something you don't have. I have something you want. So I'm only, I'm means I'm superior to you. I have something you don't have. I have something you want. So I'm more powerful than you. I'm above you. And if I have a lot, I'm omnipotent.

Giving enhances the narcissist's fantastic grandiosity and the contempt that he holds for others.

The narcissist giving is contemptuous giving. He disdains you as he helps you. His help comes with strings attached and these are the strings of derision, of mockery, of humiliation. It is easy to feel superior to the supplicating recipients of one's largesse.

Now, schizoid culturalism is about exerting control. It's about maintaining control by fostering dependence in the beneficiaries.

We all know the mothers and fathers who make sure that their offspring are around them.

Should I whisper again, Donald Trump?

And these offspring remain around them because of the giving. These parents give.

And if you dare to confront them or to disagree with them or to go against the grain or against their values or beliefs or to challenge them or to criticize them or disagree with these kind of parents, they disinherit you. They dump you, they discard you like you had never existed.

Their giving is conditional as is their love. They give you in order to enslave you.

But narcissists give for other reasons as well.

The narcissist flaunts his charitable nature as a bait. He impresses others with his selflessness and kindness. He lures people into his lair.

You know, it's an integral part of grooming. It's an integral part of love bombing. What is love bombing, if not giving emotions?

He entraps people, the narcissist, he manipulates, he brainwashes them into subservient compliance and obsequious collaboration.

People are attracted to the narcissist larger than life posture.

And then, when they get close to him, they discover his true colors, his personality traits, but that's usually far too late.

The narcissist's motto is give a little to take a lot and give a lot to take everything.

That's his creed. He gives in order to take and he gives only when he can take.

He never gives unconditional. He never sends his bread over the water. He never, he has no horizon. He cannot delay gratification. He doesn't predict or countenance the consequences of his actions, he's impulsive, he's defiant, he is totally reckless and callous and ruthless and relentless.

And so if he gives you, he wants something. If he's giving, if you're the recipient, if you receive anything from the narcissist, be on your toes, beware, caveat.

This does not prevent the narcissists from assuming the role of the exploited victim, or the sacrificial lamb.

You know, the famous mother type, who keeps telling her son, look how much I have sacrificed for you, sacrificed my life for you. You owe me.

I mean, she doesn't say you owe me, but it's the unsaid part of the sentence, the implicit part of the sentence. I've sacrificed so much for you. Now it's your honor to sacrifice so much for me.

It's a transaction. It's transactional love.

Narcissus has always complained that life and people are unfair to them, that they had invested much far more than their share of the profit.

And in this sense, there is very close affinity between narcissism and passive aggressiveness or negativistic personality disorder. The narcissist feels that he is the scapegoat, that his relationships are asymmetric and imbalanced.

Narcissus always feels, I explained it in a previous video that the narcissist has a problem of weighting. He gives wrong weights to things.

If he has bad memories, they outweigh good memories. If he has bad intimations or bad emotions, they outweigh good emotions, to the extent that good emotions become inaccessible, totally repressed.

And similarly, if he gives, he weighs what he gives weighs much more than what he receives, always.

So, narcissist's husband is likely to say, she's getting or she got out of our marriage far more than I did. Or I invested in my marriage much more or in their relationship.

It's a common refrain. Or I do all the work around here and they get all the credit and the perks and the benefits.

Faced with such misperceived injustice and once the relationship is clinched and the victim is whooped, the narcissist tries to minimize his contributions, because he had contributed until now, no. Now he deserves just to take.

So his investment is minimal, it's goal-oriented, and it ceases abruptly when he had secured his prey or his victim.

The narcissist regards his input as a contractual maintenance chore and the unpleasant and inevitable price that he has to pay for his narcissistic supply. He resents the fact that he has to pay this price.

After many years of feeling deprived, feeling wrong, discriminated against, feeling at the receiving end of injustice, some narcissists lapse into sadistic generosity, or what I call sadistic altruism.

They use their giving, they use their charity as a weapon to taunt and torment the needy, to humiliate them, to chastise them, to demean and debase them.

This is very common in religious settings where you have a sadistic clergyman or a sadistic preacher or priest or whatever. And they use the bully pulpit to kind of torment and torture their community or specific members of the community.

In the distorted thinking of the narcissist, donating money gives him the right, gives him the license to hurt people, to criticize them, to berate the recipients.

The narcissist feels that his generosity, his charity, elevate him to a higher moral ground and give him the right to preach and to hector and to dictate and to set rules.

Most narcissists, and by the way, this is also true if the giving is not direct.

And narcissists can say, for example, all my life I had been sacrificing, now you owe me. Or all my life I have been giving to others. Now you owe me.

It's like there is this universal, global, lifelong ledger and the narcissist expects you to pay the price for every good deed that he had done and whose beneficiaries were other people.

So be very, very wary, very cautious and very afraid of people who tell you how to live, people who create a system of rules, or a system of dictates or guidelines on what's a proper way to live.

Because these people usually have a victim mentality, a victim stance. They feel that life owes them.

And now they are going to extract from life and extricate from life and milk life and squeeze life until life gives them back what life owes them.

They've gone through a lot, they've suffered a lot, they've sacrificed immeasurably, and now they are entitled, they deserve, and they're going to be aggressive about it.

Most narcissists confine their giving to money and material goods. Their munificence is an abusive defense mechanism intended to avoid real intimacy.

So you would have the spouse who gives his wife or his husband, never mind, money, and that's it. Like I've given you money. What else do you want? What? I gave you money, you also want intimacy? You're glutton. You know? It's like I'm buying your absence with my money. Go take the money, go shop, go do whatever you want. Leave me alone.

Their big-hearted charity renders all their relationships, even with their spouses, even with their children. Business-like, structured, limited, minimum. Accounting type, non-emotional, unambiguous and non-ambivalent.

The relationships of narcissists, a relationship with narcissists is always cold, always calculated, always schematic, and always by a ledger.

I did this for you yesterday, now you owe me. I did this for you two years ago. Now you owe me. I've invested in you ten years. Now you owe me. I allowed you to become a medical doctor. Now you owe me.

By doling out bounteously, the narcissist knows where he stands. His giving is an entry in the ledger, and his accounting double entry mind always calculates.

So giving allows him to position himself in the ledger. He sees the discrepancies. He can calculate them. He knows what he is owed. He knows where he stands. He doesn't feel threatened by demands of commitment, emotional investment, empathy, intimacy.

In the narcissist's wasteland of a life, even his benevolence is spiteful, sadistic, punitive and distancing.

There's a proverb of the Inuit in Greenland, by gifts one makes slaves, and by whips, one makes dogs. Wonderful saying.

And there is a book titled Debt: The First 5,000 Years it was written by the late David Graeber, was published in 2011. And there's an interview there with an Inuit hunter.

And the Inuit hunter says, up in our country, we are human. And since we are human, we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say, thank you for that. What I get today, you may get tomorrow.

There are two types of narcissists: stingy mean, or compulsive givers.

Most narcissists feel abused and exploited when they have to pay money in order to satisfy the needs and wishes of their nearest and dearest.

The vast majority of narcissists are actually stingy.

Even when they spend money, they spend it their way, on their priorities, on their preferences and wishes, and according to their view of the future, their narrative, their construct.

They're going to lavish money on you, but the wrong kind of money, and they're going to buy you things you don't want, and send you to places you don't wish to be in, and so on, or force you to study when you don't want to study, and so on.

Compulsive givers, to all appearances, the compulsive giver is an altruistic, empathic and caring person. People look from the outside, they say, wow, he gives her so much.

Actually, he or she, the narcissist, is a people pleaser and a codependent.

A compulsive giver is trapped in a narrative of his own confabulation.

How his nearest and dearest need him. They need him because they are poor, or they're young, or they're inexperienced, or they're lacking in intelligence, or they're ugly, or they're otherwise inferior to him.

Inferior, that's the key. He wants to feel superior by giving.

Compulsive giving, therefore, involves pathological narcissism because it involves the reassertion or assertion of superiority. It buttresses, it underlies, grandiosity.

The ostentatiousmunificence, magnificence, and largesse of codependent compulsive givers is intended to secure the presence and attachment of their loved ones.

They bribe people, they pay people to be next to them, to be near them, to be with them.

They don't believe, they have such low self-esteem and such a labile sense of self-worth, they can't believe that people would want to be with them, except if they pay them, except if they endow them with something, with money.

This is their way of fending off, looming in their mind, inevitable abandonment.

By giving inexorably, these people aim to foster the recipient kind of addictive habit and to prevent the recipients from leaving them.

In reality, it is a compulsive giver who is actually aggressive. He coerces, he cajoles, he tempts people, he seduces people around him to avail themselves of his services or money. He forces himself on the recipients of his ostentatious giving.

Many of the beneficiaries of his generosity or magnanimity don't want it, but he kind of coerces them. He insists, he's persistent, he makes it a nuisance of himself.

He is unable to deny anyone their wishes or requests, but sometimes he dictates to them that they should have wishes and requests.

Even when these are not explicit or expressed, even when these wishes and requests are figments of his own imagination, his own neediness and grandiosity.

Inevitably, this kind of person, this compulsive, narcissistic compulsive giver, he developed some unrealistic expectations.

He feels that people should be immensely grateful to him, and that their gratitude should translate into a kind of obsequiousness, obeisance.

That they should be subservient and subjugated to him because he's giving.

You know, you won't come across such people, the boss, the giving boss, the giving mother, the giving father.

The only condition is that you behave with humility, that you subjugate yourself, that you prostrate yourself, that you kowtow, that you kneel in front of them, that you genuflect.

Internally, compulsive giver seethers, seethers, and rages against the lack of reciprocity that he perceives in his relationships with family, with friends, with colleagues.

He says, I'm giving so much and receiving nothing. They are so ungrateful.

He mutely castigates everyone around him for being so ungenerous.

So the compulsive giver, giving is perceived as sacrifice, taking is exploitation.

When they take from him, they're exploiting him.

And so he gives without grace, always with visible strings attached, always with the sour face, always grimacing.

No wonder the Compulsive Giver is always frustrated and often aggressive and given a wide berth.

In psychological jargon, we would say that the Compulsive Giver has alloplastic defenses with an external locus of control.

This simply means that the Compulsive Giver relies on input from people around him to regulate his fluctuating sense of self-worth, his precarious self-esteem, his ever-shifting moods.

It also means that he blames the world for his failures.

He feels imprisoned in a hostile and mystifying universe, entirely unable to influence events, circumstances, and outcomes, in manipulating of people and occurrences.

And so the compulsive giver avoids assuming responsibility for the consequences of his actions.

And yet it is important to realize that the compulsive giver cherishes, relishes his self-conferred victimhood.

He nurtures his grudges by maintaining a meticulous accounting of everything he had given and had received.

Empath? Should I whisper empaths?

This mental operation of masochistic bookkeeping is the background processof which a compulsive giver is sometimes unaware.

But he is likely to vehemently deny such meanness and narrow-mindedness.

I, no way, I am big-hearted, I'm golden-hearted. I never keep accounts.

Compulsive Endeavour is an artist of projective identification.

He manipulates people around him into behaving exactly the way he expects them and wants them to.

He keeps lying to people. He keeps telling them the act of giving is the only reward that he seeks.

Giving is its own reward, such people say. I don't want anything more than that. I don't even want your gratitude.

Giving to you is my satisfaction, my gratification.

And all the while, that's a lie, of course. All the while the compulsive giver secretly yearns for gratitude and reciprocity.

He rejects any attempt to rob him of his sacrificial victim status.

He will not accept gifts or money or help or advice or tips or succor, and he avoids being the recipient or beneficiary of compliments or anything positive.

And this false asceticism, withholding, fake modesty, pseudo humility, they are baits.

Don't fall for them. It's a show. It's not real.

He uses these things to prove to himself that his nearest and dearest are nasty ingrates.

It's his way of setting you up for failure. It's his way of testing you and making sure that you fail the test.

Had they wanted to give me a present, had they wanted to help me, they would have insisted.

The compulsive giver bellows triumphantly.

His worst fears and suspicions yet again confirmed.

He's happy. He's happy because he cast you in the role of rogues, of takers, of exploitors, of nasty mean characters.

And by comparison, in contrast, makes him look good.

And gradually, people fall into line, they begin to feel that they are the ones who are doing the compulsive giver a favor by succumbing to his endless and over-winning charity.

When you ask the recipients of the compulsive giver, the son with his father, the daughter with her mother, the employee with his boss, all of them compulsive givers, they would tell you what can we do? They would sigh.

It means so much to him. It means so much to her. And she or he has put so much effort into it. I just couldn't say no.

The roles are reversed. and then everyone is happy. The beneficiary is benefit and the compulsory giver goes on feeling that the world is unjust and that people are self-centered exploiters. As he has always suspected. Everyone falls into place. It's a classic, classic projected identification scenario.

And the narcissist has a very peculiar relationship with money.

When the narcissist has money, he can exercise his sadistic urges freely and with little fear of repercussions. Money shields the narcissists from life itself, from the outcomes and consequences of misconduct, misdeeds, and misbehavior. It's isolating. It's a warm and safe womb or cocoon like a benevolent blanket, like a mother's good night kiss.

Money is a love substitute. We know it in psychology. Money is undoubtedly a love substitute. And it allows the narcissist to be his ugly, corrupt and dilapidated self with impunity. Money buys the narcissist absolution.

You know, in the Middle Ages, there was something called indulgences. You paid money to the Catholic Church, and they gave you a piece of paper saying, all your sins are forgotten when you go to heaven.

That's money for the narcissist. It buys him absolution. And his egosyntonic friendship, forgiveness and acceptance.

With money in the bank, the narcissist feels at ease with himself, free, arrogantly sorry and supreme about the contemptible unwashed masses. With money lining his pockets.

The narcissists can always find people poorer than him, a cause for great elation coupled with ostentatious disdain and bumpciousness on his part.

Narcissists hate weak people. They detest the poor. They want to trample on them and crush them and see them dead. And money gives them this power.

The narcissist rarely uses money to buy, corrupt and intimidate outright. He is more subtle than that. But he uses money to humiliate, to put people in the right place to take them down a peg or a notch.

Contrary to common stereotype, the narcissist's avarice, his greediness, seldom devolves into conspicuous consumption.

Actually, in my survey of narcissists, there's close to 1,900 people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder in a database that I had constructed over 25 years. And I found that many narcissists, they wear 15-year-old tattered clothing. They have no car, no house, no property.

And it's so even when the narcissist can afford better, when he has money.

Money has little to do with the narcissist's actual physical needs or even with his social interactions. It's true that the narcissist leverages money to acquire status or to impress others.

But most narcissists conceal the true extent of their wealth. They hoard the money. They accumulate. And like the miseries that they are at heart, like the stingy characters they are, they count the money daily and in the dark.

Money is the narcissist's implicit license. Background noise, background background enabler.

So it's a license to sin, license to abuse, it's his permit, it's his promise, it's his fulfillment, all at once.

Money unleashes the beast in the narcissist, and with abandon, encourages him, seduces him to be himself. This obnoxious, mean, nasty, vulgar, very often aggressive and violent person.

Narcissists are not necessarily tight-fisted though. Many a narcissist spend money on restaurants and trips abroad and books and health products. Some narcissists buy gifts, though reluctantly, and is a maintenance chore.

Narcissists addictively gamble. They speculate in the stock exchange, let's say, they lose fortunes.

Narcissus is insatiable, always wants more, the loose fortunes. Marxist is insatiable. Always wants more. Always loses the little that he has.

But he does all this, not for the love of money, for he does not use money to gratify himself or to cater to his own needs.

No, he does all this. He doesn't crave money. He doesn't care for money. He wants power. Money gives him power, bestows power on him. That matters. The legitimacy to dare, to flare, to conquer, to oppose, to resist, to tone, to defy, to torment. This is what money gives him.

So, now this is stingy with others. Maybe sometimes he's not stingy with himself. Maybe sometimes he's not tight-handed or tight-fisted with other people.

But all this, money he spends on himself, money he spends on others, all this is within a narrative of empowerment, a storyline of superiority, a script of dominance, suppression, content, humiliation, subjugation. Money equals sadism.

In all these relationships, the narcissist is either the vanquished or the vanquisher, either the haughty master or an object slave, either the dominant or the recessive.

The narcissist interacts along an up-down axis rather than along left-right axis. His world is not lateral, not horizontal, it's vertical. His world is rigidly hierarchical and abusively stratified.

And that's why narcissists find it very difficult to network. And when they do network, it's with a power of asymmetry.

When the narcissist is submissive, he's contemptibly submissive. He's a doormat. And these are the covert narcissists.

When he's domineering, he's disdainfully domineering. His life is a dedication, a symphony of sadistically taunting, tantalizing, humiliating and frustrating other people. And he pendulates, he swings between oppressor and oppressed.

I discussed this in other videos when I explain the transitions from overt to covert and so.

To subjugate another person, one must be capricious, unscrupulous, ruthless, obsessive, hateful, vindictive, penetrating. One must spot the cracks of vulnerability, the chinks in the armor, the crumbling foundations of susceptibility, the pains, the trigger points and mechanisms, the Pavlovian reactions of hate and fear and hope and anger.

Cold empathy is this. It's this scanning device, a radar, a vulnerability radar, as Joanne Lachkar called it the V-spot.

And money liberates a narcissist's mind and unleashes this cold empathy. It endows him with the tranquility, detachment and incisiveness of a natural scientist. He observes the insects that are other people.

With his mind free of the quotidian, of the pedestrian, of the daily, of the mundane, the narcissist can concentrate on attaining the desired position, to be on top, to be dreaded, feared, shunned, admired, adulated, whatever.

He wants to be obeyed. He wants to be deferred to. And he then proceeds with cool disinterest to unscramble the human jigsaw puzzle, to manipulate the parts, to enjoy their anguish, as he exposes other people's petty misconduct, as he harps on their insecurities and failures, as he compares other people to their betters, as he mocks their incompetence, their hypocrisy, their stupidity.

But then, when you think that he had changed, that he had improved, that he had become, you know, more human, he draws the dagger. He just wants you to get close enough to him, to stab you.

He casts himself in the role of a brave, incorruptible iconoclast, a rebel, a fighter for social justice, an activist for a better future, for more efficiency, for good causes, an altruist, an empathic and selfless benefactor, a public intellectual who loves humanity, a coach who will tell you how to make it until you fake it. And the other way.

But it is all, trust me, all about his sadistic urges, really, about his need to feel top dog. It's all death. It's all thematic. It's not about life. There's no libido or eros there. It's all inanimate.

And still, antagonizing and alienating potential benefactors is a pleasure that the narcissist cannot afford on an empty purse.

When he is impoverished, he is altruism embodied, the best of friends. When he is poor, he is the best of friends. He's the most caring of tutors, a benevolent mentor and guide, a lover of humanity, an empathic, fierce fighter against narcissism, sadism, racism, and abuse in all their forms.

And the narcissist adheres. He obeys, he succumbs, he smiles, he hugs and embraces you, he agrees allheartedly, he gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling, he praises, he condones, he idolizes, he applauds, is perfection.

It's too good to be true because it's not true.

He is the perfect audience. A mirror. A hall of mirrors. There's nobody there. You see yourself. He is a blank screen and you project yourself on that screen and fall in love with yourself.

He admires you, he adulates you. He warms his way in.

He's an amoeba, azoleic, spineless, chameleon, adaptable in form, slithery flexibility, protean.

To behave this way for long is unbearable. Hence, the narcissist's addiction to money.

Money is the freedom from the need to act. Freedom from the need to not be yourself. All forms of power and money liberate.

It is his evolutionary ladder from slime to sublime and henceforth to mastery. From zero to hero takes a lot of investment and money.

And the narcissist puppets are on the receiving end. The recipients of the narcissists tainted and conditional largesse, elles, similarly equate money with love.

Craving love, they settle for money.

With so many strings attached to the narcissists' so-called gifts, the people around him end up entangled, dangling like dysfunctional marionettes, like puppets in a narcissus' theatre of the absurd.

The psychedelic dimensions of money and of giving, a myriad, the whole literature. And they're crucial to maintaining the victim's precarious inner balance.

People embark on great feats of self-deception and cognitive dissonance in order to justify the sacrifices that they make in their self-dignity, self-respect, and perception of reality.

They have to make these sacrifices in order to remain on the narcissist's good books. It's a sorry state to be in need of the narcissist charity.

Self-awareness is never far under the surface. The victim struggles, the state of constant dissonance.

And gradually the human props in the narcissus stage plays, they rebel outwardly or inwardly. They become passive-aggressive, bitter, depressed and paranoid.

People around the narcissists, never mind how much he had given them, how much he had helped them, how much money he lavished upon them, they feel alienated, dehumanized, objectified, misunderstood.

They seek to free themselves by becoming contumacious, unruly, counter-dependence, or clinging to the Narcissus and emotionally extorting all they can.

In other words, the Narcissus fosters co-dependence in his circle.

And these reactive behavior patterns are ingrained and they're very hard to break.

Gradually, over time, they ossify into the molds in which the narcissists' victims fester and putrefying, writhing in agony and crumbling, whenever the narcissist inflicts on them, abused in its many forms.

The victims become brittle, fragile.

If they do not extricate themselves in time, these victims, this, I mean, you can be a survivor or victim. These people become victims and they gradually acquire many of the traits and behavior patterns of their own narcissistic abuses and tormentors.

They form with the narcissists, the shared psychosis. I call it the shared fantasy.

A mini cult of domination and subjugation that is mediated via the ubiquitous dollar sign.

It's dangerous to stick around.

That's why in 1995 I insisted on the no contact principle strategy with all its 100 rules. No contact strategy is 100 rules for information.

So I insisted on this because even one day with the narcissist is not safe. The narcissist can reach inside your mind and tear you apart if he knows what he's doing in less than an hour.

The narcissist is confident that people find him irresistible. His unfailing charm is part of his self-imputed omnipotence.

Some narcissists are charming for a certain period of time.

But for the narcissist to believe that he is all doing, charming all the time, is an inane conviction, counterfactual, is not true.

But the narcissist behaves as if it were true. The narcissist behaves as if he were charming all the time.

And this is called pathological charming. And this type of narcissist is the pathological charmer.

The somatic narcissist and the histrionic flaunt the sex appeal, the virility or femininity, sexual prowess, musculature, physique, training, good looks or athletic achievements.

Cerebral narcissist seeks to enchant and entrance his audience with intellectual pyrotechnics.

Many narcissists brag about their wealth, their health, the possessions, collections, spouses, children, personal history, accomplishments, family tree, you name it.

In short, anything that gathers them attention and renders them alluring.

Other narcissists broadcast the message, I'm actually one of you. I'm just like you. I'm struggling, I'm failing, sometimes I'm accomplishing things. So I'm trustworthy, I'm likable. Bill Clinton, anyone?

Both types of narcissists firmly believe that being unique, because they're unique, they're entitled to special treatment by other people.

They deploy their charm offensives to manipulate their nearest and dearest or even complete strangers. They use these people around them as instruments of gratification. They charm them into collaboration and cooperation. They charm them into providing supply.

This process is called co-optation.

Exerting personal magnetism and charisma become ways of asserting control and obviating other people's personal boundaries and weariness.

The pathological charmer feels superior to the person that he captivates and fascinates.

As far as the pathological charmer is concerned, charming someone means having power over her, controlling her, subjugating her, rendering her submissive.

It's all a mind game, intertwined with a power play.

The person to be enthralled is an object, a prop, a mere prop, or of dehumanized utility.

In some cases, pathological trauma involves more than a grain of sadism. It provokes in the narcissist sexual arousal by inflicting the pain of subjugation on the beguiled.

And the beguiled cannot help, but be enchanted. It's like in the fairy tales, childhood fairy tales.

I again implore you to read a wonderful book by Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim is an amazing story, by the way. He claimed at the time to have been a child psychologist, and today we know that he was lying. But he still wrote a wonderful book analyzing fairy tales.

The pathological charmer engages in infantile magical thinking. He uses charm to help maintain object constancy and to fend off abandonment.

In other words, to ensure that the person that they had bewitched won't disappear on him.

It's like he bewitches the person, he enchants the person, and that person freezes. It's a sub-variant, some type of what I call snapshoting.

Some narcissists like to surprise people. They drop in unannounced. They organize events or parties, unbidden. They make decisions on behalf of unsuspecting parties.

And this variety of pathological charmers believe that their mere presence guarantees the gratitude and delight of the intended targets of their generous and spontaneous campaigns.

Pathological charmers react with rage and aggression when their intended targets prove to be impervious and resistant to their lure and charm.

It's a narcissistic injury, being spurned, being rebuffed.

When someone sees through the narcissist, when the narcissist's motivation is transparent, makes them feel threatened, rejected, denuded.

Being ignored amounts to a challenge to their uniqueness, entitlement, control and superiority.

Narcissists wither without constant narcissistic supply. When their charm fails to elicit supply, they feel an out, non-existent, dead.

Expectedly, pathological charmers go to great lengths to secure the aforementioned supply.

It is only when their efforts are frustrated that the mask of civility, congeniality, charm, the mask drops and reveals the true face of the narcissists, a predator on the parole, unshaven and with a single shirt. Hint, hint.

There's a subtype of pathological charmer. They are known as people pleasers.

Briefly, people pleases dread conflicts. They wish to avoid conflict. They are conflict-averse.

And so they have a need to believe that they are universally liked. They are always pleasant, always well-mannered, always civil.

The conflict-averse people-pleaser, at the same time is also always evasive, always vague, hard to pin down, sometimes obsequious and obeying and submissive, but generally a spineless non-entity.

These qualities are self-defeating, of course. They tend to antagonize people rather than please them.

Uriah Heep in David Copperfield is a people-pleaser at the beginning. He's a covert narcissist until the mask falls and you see the covert narcissist.

Conflict aversion is only one of several psychodynamic backgrounds for the behavior known as people-pleasing.

Some people pleasers cater to the needs and demands of others as a form of penance, a form of self-sacrifice. They are masochistic people pleasers.

Many people pleases are codependents and they strive to gratify their nearest and dearest in order to allay their own abandonment anxiety and the ensuing, intense and at times life-threatening, dysphoria.

They say to themselves, if I'm nice to him, if I please him, if I cater to his needs, unthinkingly, instinctingly, all the time, he won't leave me, he won't break up with me. She won't leave me.

So pleasing is a form of insurance policy, a guarantee.

And a few people pleases are narcissistic. Pleasing people enhances their sense of omnipotence, grandiosity, as I mentioned before.

They seek to control and disempower their charges. They say, she so depends on me, she so looks up to me, you know.

Even their pity is a form of self-aggrandizance. Only I can make her life so much better. She needs me. Without me, her life would be hell.

They are misanthropical traits. They are compulsive givers.

All people's pleasers use these common coping strategies.

One, dishonesty in order to avoid conflicts and unpleasant situations. They prevaricate, they confabulate, or outright lie.

Number two, manipulation to ensure desired outcomes, such as an intimate partner's continued presence.

Number three, fostering dependence. Co-dependent people pleasers leverage their ostentatious helplessness, and they manifest weaknesses in order to elicit the kind of behaviors and solicit the benefits that they handle for, while narcissistic people pleasers aim to habituate their targets by bribing them with gifts, monopolizing their time, or isolating them socially.

4. Strategy. Infantilization. Displaying childish behaviors in order to gratify the emotional needs of overprotective, possessive, paranoid, narcissistic and co-dependent individuals in the people-pleases milieu.

And number five, self-punishment, self-defeat, self-sacrifice, to signal self-annulment, prostration, submissiveness in the pursuit of people pleasing.

My next video will deal with all this in sex. Sex within committed, romantic, intimate relationships. How all these features, feature in these kind of relationships with a narcissist.

Okay, kiddos, I hope you had fun, and this is me, bidding you farewell. You please me a lot, and you allowed me to compulsively give to you, and that makes me one very happy and superior narcissist. You know, Thank you.

Get this, that you hold a degree in psychology doesn't make you an expert on narcissism and psychopathy. Psychology is a vast field with dozens of sub-specialties. It's not enough to have a PhD or something in psychology.

You need to work in the field for decades. You need to study. You need to be involved in all kinds of research. You need to publish peer-reviewed papers, you need to participate in international conferences.

And if you don't do any of these, you're not an expert.

So, unfortunately, online, there are many people with academic degrees, real ones in psychology, but who don't have the first clue about narcissism or psychopathy and pretend that they do. Or you know what? Even honestly believe they do. Delude themselves into thinking that they are experts. They are not.

So today I would like to discuss three bits of nonsense propagated by these self-styled, self-ordained experts.

And I would like to start by the famous sentence, All psychopaths are narcissists.

That is not true.

As I said, many self-styled narcissism experts quote unquote would tell you with the fake authoritativeness of the hack that all psychopaths are narcissists and it is rank nonsense.

The comorbidity of narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder and the comorbidity of narcissistic personality disorder and psychopathy, which is, by the way, not an accepted clinical entity. It's not an accepted diagnosis.

Anyhow, the comorbidity of narcissism and psychopathy, in other words, the number of times we diagnose pathological narcissism and psychopathy in the same patient or client, this comorbidity is there, but it's still a small minority of the cases.

Yes, you heard me well. Only very few psychopaths are diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, and only very few people with narcissistic personality disorder are diagnosed with psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder.

So the sentence, all psychopaths and narcissists, is counterfactual. It represents profound ignorance of both narcissism and psychopathy.

How come? Where is the source of the confusion?

Most psychopaths are grandiose. They have grandiosity.

But anyone who confuses grandiosity with narcissism has no business deceiving the gullible and to believe that he or she is an expert on narcissism.

Because grandiosity is not narcissism. Grandiosity is a fantasy defense. It is founded on a cognitive distortion, a misperception of reality, an impaired reality testing.

Grandiosity makes an appearance in many mental health disorders, many personality disorders, including borderline, paranoid and schizoid personality disorders. Grandiosity appears in certain mood disorders, for example, the manic phase of bipolar disorders, and grandiosity also appears in psychotic disorders and this is a very partial list.

Grandiosity is an extensive parameter of several mental health disorders, one of which is of course narcissistic personality disorder. It's a fantasy defense and fantasy is very common in the vast majority actually of mental illnesses.

One should not confuse grandiosity with narcissism if one is really an expert. If one were really into this subfield of psychology, one would never make this mistake.

Grandiosity is common to both narcissists and psychopaths. No one is denying this.

Actually, the PCLR, the test designed by Robert Hare, which is commonly used to diagnose psychopathy, the PCLR has a grandiosity dimension.

But grandiosity, that is common to both narcissists and psychopath, does not make narcissists and psychopaths one of the same. It does not even predict comorbidity.

The fact that narcissists and psychopaths both share the trait or the cognitive distortion of grandiosity doesn't make them one and the same or comorbid.

In other words, very few psychopaths are actually narcissists because narcissism is about a lot more than grandiosity.

Narcissism involves a panoply of traits, behaviors, cognitions, effects, moods, etc. Narcissism is a hyper-complex phenomenon. It cannot be reduced only to grandiosity.

But this is only one of the more egregious examples of self-propagated ignorance, ignorance masquerading as expertise. The gullible forfeit told what they want to hear, they gravitate towards these so-called experts and scholars.

But these people have no idea what they're talking about. I'm terribly sorry. This is pure nonsense.

Let's consider another case.

20 years ago, I coined the phrase communal, prosocial narcissists. I described a kind of narcissist whose grandiosity is invested in being actually morally upright, being charitable, being altruistic, giving and forgiving.

This communal prosocial narcissist is what you would call a good person. He holds no grudges. He is not vindictive. He is helpful. He is supportive. He imitates empathy to a great extent.

Similarly, there is a communal pro-social psychopath. It's a psychopath who leverages his psychopathy to find love, acceptance, and social legitimacy. He sublimates his antisocial tendencies.

Secondary psychopaths, Factor 2 psychopaths, are all communal prosocial psychopaths. It's another name, secondary psychopathy is another name for borderline personality disorder because it involves mostly dysregulated emotions.

The covert borderline, which is a new diagnosis that I'm proposing and promoting right now, the covert borderline is a communal variant of the psychopath. He's a good family man. He loves his children. He is faithful to his spouse. He is a pillar of the community and society.

The communal pro-social psychopath seeks love the way a psychopath would, for example, by becoming sexually dysregulated, unboundary, self-trashing, and promiscuous. These are all psychopathic behaviors because they involve recklessness, they involve a lack of impulse control and to some extent contumaciousness and defiance.

So the communal psychopath would leverage his psychopathy, his psychopathic traits and behaviors to obtain socially acceptable goals such as belonging, acceptance, love, endearment, family.

This subtype of psychopaths craves to belong and to be loved, to be liked, to be admired and desired. And so he would do anything, including anti-social acts, to feel that way and to accomplish these goals, because psychopaths are always goal-oriented.

But the goals could be socially positive, pro-social. Both primary and secondary psychopaths can be communal, but their personality disorder psychopathy is likely to be comorbid with other mental health issues. And it is this comorbidity that causes them to behave in ways which are reminiscent of borderlines and pro-social or communal narcissists.

Actually only recently there's been a study published and this study refutes a lot of the nonsense propagated online.

Narcissists are merciless. Nassies are heartless. Narcissuses are callous and relentless and ruthless. Nassies are out to get you. They're vindictive and so and so forth.

First of all, this is a description, not of narcissists, but of psychopathic narcissists, malignant narcissists or psychopaths. Typical narcissists are not like that at all, actually.

So there's a lot of confusion, God-awful confusion between narcissists and psychopaths.

The study is titled, I'm Merciful, Am I Not? Facets of Narcissism and Forgiveness and Forgiveness Revisited. It was co-authored by Virgil Zeigler- Hill, Michaela Schroda, and Ramsey Sufaat.

I am seriously not responsible for these names, and I fully understand why people with such names would end up being psychologists trying to understand the punishment inflicted upon them.

Okay, there was a joke, don't take it so seriously.

Anyhow, these guys and girls had published a study in 2017, which one would have thought would have informed the self-proclaimed and self-styled experts online.

But they don't bother to read anything. They don't bother to educate themselves. They just keep spewing and rehashing and recycling the same old, worn, trite cliches, which are counterfactual in the majority of cases.

Let's look at what this study says.

The study examined links between narcissism and forgiveness, believe it or not. Forgiveness was assessed via self-reporting and via a test called the implicit association test.

Antagonistic narcissism was negatively correlated with forgiveness. That's not surprised there. Antagonistic narcissism is what we would call overt or grandiose narcissism, or as we are currently beginning to believe a form of psychopathy, primary psychopathy.

But agentic and communal pro-social narcissism were positively correlated with forgiveness, you heard it correctly big numbers narcissists, agentic narcissists, common narcissists, prosocial narcissists, it's not a small number. Big number of narcissists actually tend to forgive more than usual.

Narcissism facets were not significantly correlated with implicit forgiveness. Let me read to you the abstract of the study. Narcissists are said to be particularly unforgiving, yet previous research remained inconclusive. This is likely because most previous studies focused on narcissism as a unitary construct, thereby neglecting its multiple facets. The present study aimed to clarify the nuanced associations between different facets of narcissism and forgiveness, the latter being assessed via self-report and non-self-report measures.

The result of a structural equation model, SEM, showed that antagonistic aspects of narcissism were negatively correlated with explicit forgiveness. Not surprised there. Importantly, a genetic as well as commonal aspects of narcissism were positively correlated with explicit forgiveness. Aspects of narcissistic personality were not correlated with implicit forgiveness, but were correlated with explicit forgiveness. The results suggest that not all facets of narcissism are associated with an unforgiving stance. Let me break it down to you using human speak. Narcissistic people, every self-styled and self-proclaimed expert online will tell you that narcissistic people they hold grudges they are unforgiving they go after you they're vindictive etc etc that is not true at least not true for all narcissists

as i said this study was published in the journal of research in personality in 2017 and

what this offers did they broke narcissism into three subtypes, antagonistic, agentic, and commonal. Antagonistic narcissism is a tendency to strive for supremacy and derogate other people. A gentic narcissism refers to a tendency to self-promote oneself and seek admiration. Commonal narcissism describes the tendency to have a grandiose view of one's own helpfulness to other people. I'm quoting from an interview that Ramsey Fatfuta, the lead offer, had given. He said in the interview, the construct of narcissism has fascinated me since I was working on my PhD thesis on the correlates of forgiveness. Already there, I discovered that not all types of narcissism come across as unforgiving as previously assumed, as only the antagonistic, but not the agenic narcissists tend to show revenge-related reactions following conflict or transgression.

My co-authors and I wanted to follow up on the relationship between different narcissism facets and forgiveness, further examining a third facet, common on narcissism, as well as narcissistic forgiveness at an implicit, in other words, automatic level. So they studied, this is a huge study by the way. One of the biggest studies ever conducted on narcissism. There were well over 1,100 individuals and they found evidence that certain forms of narcissism are actually associated with a more forgiving stance. You heard it here. You heard it here the first time. Many narcissists are more forgiving than normal people. Individuals who scored high on measures of agentic and common narcissism tended to agree with statements like, I tend to get over it quickly when someone hurts my feelings. The opposite was true for those who scored high on a measure of antagonistic narcissism. So, Fatfutah says in an interview to Saipost, not all types of narcissists seem to be unforgiving, merciless, or resentful.

In fact, those narcissists who elevate themselves above others based on their self-perceived moral superiority, those narcissists known as communal narcissists, or those narcissists who elevate themselves for the sake of being admired by other people, a genetic narcissists, those narcissists describe themselves as being particularly lenient. That's me.

In contrast, those narcissists marked by a hostile interpersonal style known as antagonistic narcissists reported greater levels of unforgiveness. Interestingly, however, continues Fatfuta, all three narcissism types were not correlated with implicit self-views of forgiveness. This observation may indicate, for example, that the concept of forgiveness is not central to narcissists' inner self-perception. However, this hypothesis remains to be tested in future research.

The study is very well constructed. It's cross-sectional and it prevented the authors from making inferences about cause and effect.

Fatfuta adds in the interview, the causality of the narcissism-forgiveness relationship is yet to be established.

Do experiences of conflict and associated unforgiveness or forgiveness cultivate narcissistic traits?

Or, alternatively, does narcissism ultimately lead to the development of a more or less forgiving stance?

Which is the chicken, which is the egg?

Also, continues Svathfuta, we focused on grandiose narcissism as a continuous trait of normal, in other words, subclinical personality.

An open question pertains to whether the observed relationships hold for pathological narcissism as well.

These and other questions need to be addressed in future investigations.

For an informed and updated view of narcissism, stick to channels by real experts on the topic.

When you come across a channel, look at the biography of the self-proclaimed, self-styled expert.

Did he or she publish anything on the topic in a peer-reviewed magazine, academic journal?

Did she participate in any international conference and presented a paper or a video presentation?

Is she recognized in her field, is she cited by other authors?

And if not, stay away she or he, the self-proclaimed expert, are fake.

Victims of narcissistic abuse are often shocked and disoriented.

And if you listen carefully to the litany of their complaints, the stream and river of the hurt and pain, you realize that the arguments fall into three categories.

There is the shock of the immoral or the amoral.

The behavior of the narcissist is perceived as beastly, animalistic, beyond the pale.

Then there is a transactional argument. I've done so much for her. I've sacrificed a lot. And yet this is the way she is repaying my kindness.

And finally there is the very similitude or the empathy-based complaint. I'm human. He is human. And yet he is behaving in a beastly animalistic manner he is being inhuman.

Indeed, here is another dimension which sets narcissists and psychopaths apart from the rest of humanity and even undermines and challenges their self-imputed attribution as human beings.

Narcissists and psychopaths are devoid of morality. No trace of it, no hint, no shade, nothing, no morality there.

And these are the only two groups of people who are absolutely immaculate when it comes to morality, cleansed of it.

And today we are going to discuss how does this come about? How is it possible to grow up from child to adult and remain throughout untouched by ethics, by morality, and by norms?

I would like to start with a quote from a renowned psychopath and narcissist.

Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-motifications of a false vision called conscience and morality.

The Ten Commandments have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish, exactly like circumcision.

And yes, you guessed right. This was written by Adolf Hitler.

So Hitler verbalized the eternal conflict unto death between the narcissistic psychopath, or the psychopath or the narcissist, and morality and conscience.

Before we go further, let's discuss the term psychopathy a bit.

Psychopathy comes from a German word. It's a translation of a German word.

And the first use of this German word is generally credited to a psychiatrist by the name of Koch in 1888.

Ironically, psychopathy means literally a suffering soul.

So, one of the first medical professionals to describe psychopaths was the French doctor, Philippe Pinel.

In 1806, Pinel described a condition which he called mania sans délire, insanity without delirium.

One of the students of Pinel was Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol.

And he called it La Folie Raisonnante, the Rational Madness.

Benjamin Rush described it as moral derangement. Moral insanity was another popular. It was used in the United States and in England throughout the 1800s and the early 1900s.

So early on, when psychopathy has first been captured by diagnosticians, first described, it was intimately and inextricably linked to issues of morality or the lack of morality or moral insanity or moral deficit of some kind. Deficiency in morality and in character.

Now this term psychopathy gained traction gradually. And in the first start of the 1900s, it rose to prominence. And then it has been replaced by sociopathy.

Sociopathy is a term which made its first appearance in the 1930s. And for a very long time, a few decades, clinicians all over the world were using psychopathy and sociopathy interchangeably.

Even in academic studies, scholars, academic papers and textbooks, sociopathy and psychopathy were essentially synonyms. Actually, there was a preference for sociopathy because people confuse psychopathy with psychosis.

So scholars preferred, especially when communicating with the public through the media, scholars prefer to use the term sociopathy. And to this very day, you have books like The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout.

Be that as it may, the term evoked behaviors, which are largely the product of the environment. Sociopathy implied that there is some problem in interacting with and within society.

Psychopathy on the other hand began to be gradually linked to genetic issues, to brain abnormalities, both functional and structural, developmental regression or developmental arrest, and so and so forth.

So psychopathy became more and more a biological entity, while sociopathy became more a moral derangement, a moral insanity, a problem of character as it is manifested in social functioning or lack thereof.

Much later in 1980, the third edition of the DSM introduced the term antisocial personality disorder.

So this is the background.

Now in 1958 there was a guy his name was Kohlberg and Kohlberg was a student of Jean Piaget. Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist, child psychologist and the father of modern child psychology, together with Anna Freud on the one hand and Erickson on the other hand.

All three disagreed about almost everything, and yet together, put together, they provide a perfect picture of the emerging child and how the child gradually becomes an adult.

In 1958, Kohlberg designed a series of experiments or studies. He wrote down, he composed moral dilemmas, and then he tested children. He read out these moral dilemmas to children and asked them how they would have behaved in the situations described in the vignettes.

And I will tell you about one of these.

It's called Heinz's Dilemma.

And this is the story, the short story, written by Kohlberg and presented to the children.

Heinz, as implied by the name, is a character who lives somewhere in Europe.

Heinz's wife was dying from a particular type of cancer. Doctors said that a new drug might save her. The drug has been discovered by a local chemist.

And Heinz tried desperately to buy some of the drug, but the chemist was charging ten times the money it had cost to make the drug. And this was much more than Heinz could afford. Heinz could only raise half the money, even after help from family and friends.

Heinz explained to the chemist that his wife was dying and asked if he could have the drug cheaper or if he could pay the rest of the money later.

The chemist refused, saying that he had discovered the drug and was going to make a lot of money from it.

The husband was desperate to save his wife. So later that night he broke into the chemist and stole the drug.

And the question that Kohlberg presented to the children, to the, in my view, befuddled children, should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug forwife? Why should he? Or why shouldn't he have acted this way?

Colbert asked the children, should Heinz have stolen the drug? Would it change anything if Heinz did not love his wife? What if the person dying was a stranger to Heinz? Would it have made any difference? Should the police arrest the chemist for murder if the woman were to die? Should the police arrest Heinz for breaking into the pharmacy and stealing the drug? And so on and so forth.

Gradually, by introducing this story and many others to children in a wide range of ages, Colbert came up with a theory of moral development, development of morality.

But before we go into the details of a theory and apply them to the disturbed or disrupted development of narcissists and psychopaths, before we go there it's important to understand a few philosophical tenets or pillars of Colberg's work.

First of all there's the issue of this equilibrium. Moral dilemmas, moral issues, present a series of problems that create a sense of dissonance.

That's why they are called dilemmas. Limitations, the breakdown of reasoning, emotional thinking, conflicting moral edicts and principles, and so and so forth.

So the morality is based on this equilibrium. Morality is precarious. Morality is always on the verge of tumbling and disintegrating.

That was the first insight of Kohlberg.

And morality additionally is not something that emanates from the inside, at least not originally. It is an act of emulation or imitation or mimicry, being exposed to other people's point of view, points of view, role models, parental figures, even influential peers, these are the influences that shape morality.

So morality is more of an external phenomenon rather than an internal phenomenon. It is imposed from the outside. It is imported. It's very reminiscent of what Lacan has suggested.

The unconscious is actually the sum total of the speech or language of other people.

And of course, when we talk about conscience, the conscience is a cluster of introjects, a group of voices, and these voices help the person tell right from wrong. Their conscience is intimately linked, communicating with the ego, because the ego is the reality principle. If you were to act in a certain way, you would have to bear the consequences, for example.

Okay, we'll come to it a bit later.

So morality in Kolberg's work is the outcome of interactions. It's relational. It's about perspective and about perception and it entails the deep and repetitive involvement of many others.

Now Kohlberg differentiated between three levels of morality and six phases grouped into these three levels.

The first level is the pre-conventional level.

And the first stage in the first level is avoiding punishment.

Moral reasoning is based on direct consequences.

I'm going to do A, I'm going to be punished. I'm going to be rewarded, so I'm going to do A.

It's a form of very primitive operand conditioning.

Stage 2 in Level 1 is the self-interest stage.

Actions are seen in terms of rewards rather than moral value.

So I would tend to choose B as a course of action because of the reward, because it's gratifying somehow, because I'm going to be praised or I'm going to end up with a prize.

The issue is that I don't have any moral compass or moral guidelines. There is no morality involved here.

It's again a form of operand conditioning, kind of reinforcement, positive reinforcement for action type B, negative reinforcement for action type A. It's very primitive and in principle it's totally applicable to animals, not only to human beings.

The pre-conventional level is actually universal and it crosses the species barrier.

But then we begin to become human and we transition to the second level, the conventional level.

Stage three in the conventional level is the good boy attitude.

Good behavior is about living up to social expectations and roles.

These expectations and roles are communicated via the twin processes of socialization and acculturation via socialization agents like mother and father, role models, figures in mass media, social media, influences, and so forth.

Society begins to intrude upon the formation of morality and shapes it big time.

The child at this stage is asking himself, this behavior is it socially acceptable.

And behaviors which are not socially acceptable are sublimated. They are converted into other types of behaviors which are socially acceptable.

The child begins to fulfill specific roles in accordance with scripts, social scripts and later sexual scripts, roles such as gender roles, the role of a child, a son or a daughter, the role of a boyfriend, etc.

So roles, role play enters the game here.

The next stage, stage number four, is the law and order morality.

Moral reasoning considers societal laws and regulations. Everything is rigid and strict and forced from the outside via law enforcement institutions.

And morality is reactive to this information, the constraints and the constrictions of law and order.

The next level is the post-conventional level.

Stage 5 is the social contract.

Rules are seen as social agreements that can be changed when necessary.

So rules are negotiable. They reflect a consensus.

And such consensus is always ephemeral, is always transient, always reflects the exigencies and the constraints of the environment. Everything now is environmental and everything now is the outcome of coalition building, game theory, considerations, collaboration, opposition, and so and so forth.

In short, morality becomes a social play in effect.

And the final stage, and the most advanced, is the stage of universal principles.

Moral reasoning is based on universal ethical principles and justice, which appear to be at least immutable, and divorced from environmental influences, other people's opinions, consensus, coalition building, other game theoretical considerations and so on.

These are non-negotiable rules.

For example, thou shalt not kill is a universal moral principle, not dependent upon a period in history, upon context, upon a specific society, cultural specifications, and so on so forth.

Of course, almost no one attains level six, because society itself disincentivizes us, does not allow us to progress there.

If you were to follow level six to its logical conclusion, ad absurdum if you wish, then you would never be able to be a soldier because thou shalt not kill, period, it's universal, it's immutable, it's non-negotiable, it's non-transformable, it's that's the way it is. So you're not allowed to kill another person and maybe even animals, and so you can't be a soldier.

So society frowns upon stage six. Society, on the very contrary, tries to render morality very malleable, very transitory, very socially determined.

Okay, so this is the picture and in a minute we'll discuss other scholars and thinkers which followed Colbert and built a whole edifice on his work.

But first, let's revert to our favorite characters, the narcissist and the psychopath, Humpty and Dumpty.

Here's the shocking truth.

The narcissist and the psychopath not only fail to progress from stage one to stage two and from stage two to stage three.

And yes, these stages are cumulative and they're dependent on each other. You cannot transition directly to stage four. You have to go through stage one and two and three to get there.

Well, narcissists and psychopaths never even begin the trip. They never even develop stage one.

The narcissists and the psychopath are devoid of empathy, at least emotional empathy.

They have something that I dubbed cold empathy, a combination of reflexive and cognitive empathy.

They don't regard, at least the narcissist doesn't regard other people as separate or external. Both the narcissists and the psychopath regard other people as pets, instruments, tools of gratification, useful obstructions, ideal images, figments in a fantasy, participants in a paracosm, anything but human beings.

Moreover, because the narcissist and the psychopath, especially the narcissist, the psychopath, the psychopath much less so, but the narcissist has an impaired reality testing. The narcissist is unable to connect his actions to the consequences of his actions.

The psychopath on the other hand, from a very early age, usually diagnosed with a conduct disorder. The psychopath is defiant, contumacious, rejects and hates authority, and reckless.

So the narcissist will not avoid punishment, will not even transition to stage one.

Remember stage one in Kohlberg's scheme? Stage one is the avoidance of punishment. Stage two is self-interest.

To remind you, according to Kohlberg, the child's moral reasoning, initially, stage one, is based on punishment, on direct consequences of the child's actions. The child anticipates and foresees and predicts punishment, and to avoid it, he imposes constraints and limitations and restrictions on his own behavior.

Similarly, a bit later in stage two, the child begins to weigh his options, his behavioral options, to weigh them in terms of punishment and reward, and the child tends to gravitate towards the rewards.

Not only children but even animals do this.

There are only two exceptions, the narcissist and the psychopath.

Narcissists and psychopaths are not responsive to punishments and to rewards, to positive reinforcement, and to negative reinforcements. They can never be conditioned in this sense.

And in the case of the narcissist, it's because he is not embedded in reality. He is subject or a victim of a fantasy defense, gone haywire.

So the narcissist is unable to connect his actions to the consequences of his actions.

The psychopath regards punishment as divorced completely from his actions.

That's why psychopaths always feel that their punishment is unjust. They feel discriminated against. They feel that other people are punishing them and they shouldn't.

Because the psychopath believes that the authority or the institution or the person who is punishing them is punishing them only because they can.

Psychopath have no concept of justice. The actions of the psychopaths should not bring about punishment.

And if they do, the punishment has nothing to do with the actions. It's just a display of power, brute, raw power.

So psychopaths cannot make the link, absolutely cannot form the link between misconduct misbehavior and misdeeds and crimes and punishment. These in their minds are totally unrelated events and reflect the power matrix.

The police is more potent and stronger than the psychopaths. So of course they punish the psychopath because they can because they have weapons because aggression and violence are normal modes of communication and interrelatedness in the psychopaths world.

And so, the narcissists and the psychopath fail to develop stages one and two, because they are unable to create an internal working model, which incorporates information about the world, information about themselves, and information about other minds, something that is known as theory of mind.

This failure to develop an internal working model is the outcome of an earlier failure to come up with a constellated integrated self or what Freud used to call ego.

Narcissists and psychopaths don't have a self. They don't have an ego, they don't have any coordinating authority or coordinating function, executive function, which puts together all the various self-states within a coherent narrative.

They don't have this, they're not cohesive. They are kaleidoscopic, they are fragmented.

So they experience their own lives as dissociated and disjointed.

And so they can't see there's no causation, there's no cause and effect in the narcissists and psychopaths lives and minds. A doesn't lead to B necessarily, crime doesn't lead to punishment necessarily. It could and does happen that A and B occur, co-occur.

So even if B follows A on a regular basis, in the psychopath's mind, it doesn't mean that A causes B or that B is somehow related to A in a highly correlated manner.

There's no correlation, let alone causation. Everything is just a hodgepodge of totally random events. So they don't even enter stage one and two.

And of course consequently, they never graduate to stage three, four, five and six.

Narcissists and psychopaths, therefore, have not a single vestige of morality, not self-interested morality, not operant conditioned morality, not social contract morality, not principled morality, philosophical morality, not type of morality whatsoever.

Not even the kind of morality that is helpful to themselves. Not even the kind of morality that is likely to render the narcissist and the psychopath more self-efficacious. Not even the kind of morality that is fake and intended to manipulate people. Not even the kind of morality that is intended to avoid punishment. Not even the kind of morality that it is intended to elicit rewards and outcomes that are favorable to the narcissists of the psychopath.

No morality, period. No conception of morality, because morality rests on two pillars.

The existence of others, a separate external entity equal to oneself morally, and cause and effect.

Both these pillars crumble in narcissism and psychopaths. The narcissists and the psychopaths, especially in the narcissist unable to perceive other people, the narcissist cannot perceive other people as external or separate to himself and the psychopath cannot perceive other people as equal to himself and both of them the narcissists and the psychopath cannot link, cannot connect events in a causal chain they cannot form chains of being chains of cause and effect they don't see how their actions might trigger responses and reactions from the environment.

They just can't see it. They don't understand that if they misbehave, if they commit a crime, they're likely to be punished.

It never crosses their minds. The punishment is going to come and when it does, the narcissist and psychopath perceive the punishment is an isolated event that had not antecedents and not precedence.

And similarly, good actions, good choices, good decisions, benevolence, altruism, charitable actions. The narcissist and the psychopath cannot see how these actions accrue and lead to some favorable social outcome.

If narcissists, when narcissists and psychopaths act pro-social communally and charitably and altruistically, it's not because they expect society to reward them somehow. It's because they are in the throes of obtaining narcissistic supply or securing some goal.

In short, these are automated procedures, automated routines intended to manipulate the environment into specific outcomes.

But not in the sense of desert. I deserve this. I'm a good person. I acted in accordance to my morality and my ethics, and therefore I deserve to be praised or rewarded in some way.

On the other hand, I'm a bad person. I acted immorally or even criminally and I deserve to be punished.

There's no desert. There's no concept of desert.

And so there's no morality in narcissism and psychopathy.

All the discussions and conversations and scholarly papers and arguments, not to mention nonsensical videos by YouTube self-styled experts, that discuss issues of morality when it comes to narcissism.

How could he have done this? This is so immoral, so unbelievable, so inhuman, so beyond the pale, so shocking.

Now, Kohlberg's work dates back to 1958, as I said. But it is still very much relevant and it's quite brilliant actually.

So there are many contemporary scholars who are still in the process of developing Kohlberg's framework. They're not using any more Kohlberg's methods.

They don't present children with morality tales or moral dilemmas that the children can never grasp.

I mean, for example, the story of Hides and his wife and the chemist and the, I mean, what child can truly grasp? These children have never been married. They've never fallen in love yet. And they definitely don't understand the meaning of intellectual property and perhaps why is it morally unjustified to break into the pharmacy and steal.

So age appropriate narratives are used today to study moral experience and moral development in children.

So for example there's work by Tappan, starting in 1996, and they use this group of psychologists, they use a narrative approach and they regard morality as a story. People construct stories and then they build identities around moral experiences.

There's moral accrual. there's an accretion of moral events or events that precipitated moral dilemmas and the resolution of moral dilemmas.

The more experience you are at exercising your moral muscles, the more likely morality will get integrated with your identity.

And this is of course part and parcel of the social cultural tradition of examining identity in social context. It's a kind of school in modern psychology. It's a contextualized understanding of moral development.

The others, there's Colby and Damon, starting in the early 1990s. they did empirical research and they used in-depth life story interviews to study moral situations, moral examples, moral dilemmas.

They asked people, how did you act in specific situations? They analyzed moral causes, moral principles.

So their work was not hypothetical. It wasn't based on hypothetical dilemmas or even narratives, but they simply ask people, how do you behave? Real moral challenges and commitments and the behaviors that ensued.

And then there was Walker and Pitts, again starting in the 1990s. They also interviewed people to ask them to discuss real life moral situations or moral dilemma situations.

And so there's a tendency today to move from hypothetical dilemmas to real life narratives and to contextualize morality in the framework of society and culture, not to regard it as a standalone thing that develops independent of society and culture, but as an artifact or an outcome of social interaction.

And this is of course another deficit when it comes to narcissists and psychopaths.

Narcissists and psychopaths are not embedded in society. They never interact with society. They have very disrupted socialization. They have extremely arrested acculturation. They are loners in the most existential sense of the word.

The narcissist is unable to perceive other people as external and sacred. Therefore, the narcissist inhabits a fantastic inner space. The narcissist, therefore, has zero experience in social interactions and never faces moral dilemmas because he doesn't recognize the existence of others.

The psychopath on the other hand rejects wholesale the very concept of society, its laws, its regulations, its mores, he rejects all this. He's contumacious, it's defiant.

And the psychopath has a basic failure in causality, in connecting actions to consequences. And so he acts recklessly.

His self is very self-destructive and self-defeating, not because he doesn't seek to maximize or to optimize his favorable outcomes, but because he's incapable of doing this.

So both of them have extreme social deficits, which would explain why they are immoral in the best case and in many cases immoral and criminal.

Now, Rest, a guy by the name of Rest and the colleagues, they've developed a theoretical model, a psychologist by the name of Rest and colleagues. They've developed a theoretical model, they moved beyond Kohlberg's stage-based approach.

The Rest model outlines four components of moral behavior: moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral motivation, and moral character.

Rest suggested that for the moral judgment component, individuals use moral schemas rather than progress through discrete stages of moral reasoning.

Schemas are generalized knowledge structures. They include beliefs and values and cognitions and emotions and experiences. Schemas help us to interpret information, situations, the environment.

And so an individual usually has multiple schemas, and each schema is available to tackle another aspect of existence.

Inevitably, there are also moral schemas, whose role is to tackle moral dilemmas and moral decision-making and moral choices.

So this is not limited to any specific developmental stage. We develop or evolve schemas and they remain with us for life.

And some examples of moral schemas that Rest and his colleagues proposed included personal interest schema, focused on individual interests and preferences, maintaining norms schema emphasizes following rules and norms and so on so forth, and post-conventional scheme considers moral ideals and principles.

So Rest regarded development as movement not to higher reasoning stages. He didn't regard it as acquiring additional more complex reasoning, but additional more complex schemas.

Lower schemas are not replaced as they are, I mean, in Kohlberg, each stage is a successor to the previous stage. There is a cumulative effect in Kohlberg's scheme. You can transition to phase four before you have gone through phases one, two, and three. So this is a cumulative thing.

But in schema theory, the schemas accrue. It's like archaeology. There are layers of schemas. And so the higher order schemas complement lower order schemas. Lower schemas are not replaced, but they're augmented, so to speak.

The schema concept is preferable, in my view at least, to the stage model.

Because Kohlberg's stage model is very rigid and not very responsive to changing contexts and fluid environments, while schemas are much more flexible and they allow us to integrate social factors into moral reasoning on the fly, which is much more. It's similar to my approach that man is a river, not a pond.

The kinetic element in psychology is missing. We tend to regard people as inert snapshots. It's very narcissistic.

And schemotherapy compensates for this.

Now, Kohlberg never claimed that there would be a one-to-one correspondence between thinking and acting. What we say and what we think don't always translate to what we do.

But he did suggest that there is some link between, you know, our thoughts, our cognitions, and our beliefs, and our speech acts, commitments via speech acts, and our essential actions.

Rest, like B, in 1994, suggested that we need to take into account habits that people develop over time.

Whether people see situations as demanding participation, sometimes you are witness to an event or an occurrence and you don't feel that you have to participate or you have afraid to participate. You're afraid of the consequences of participate.

There's the issue of costs and benefits of behaving in a particular way. And there's always competing motives.

There is this assumption that moral motivation is dominant, is superior, is likely to repress and suppress all the alternatives.

And that is wrong. That is absolutely wrong.

Peer pressure, for example, overrides moral reasoning very often. Just ask the Nazi SS or the Nazi party, where peer pressure, mob psychology, ocllococry, the rule of the mob, overrode the morality, the bourgeoisie middle-class Catholic morality of many of the Germans involved.

Self-interest very often overrides moral principles, even socially dictated moral principles, not only universal moral principles.

So moral reasoning and the evolution of moral reasoning are one component, one ingredient, one element in moral behavior.

Moral behavior is dictated by many extramural, non-moral issues. As I mentioned, peer pressure, personal interests. Sometimes there's a conflict, a deontical, a conflict of values.

So two moral values, conflict, for example, thou shalt not kill and thou shalt defend your homeland. Thou shalt not steal Heinz, but your wife is dying.

So we need to be a lot more flexible.

This is another point where the narcissist and the psychopath are likely to fail.

They are rigid structures.

The narcissist's personality is chaotic, is totally disorganized. As I said, there's no headquarters, there's no coordinating authority, there's no cohesion, no core identity.

True. To compensate for this, the narcissist imposes an extreme rigidity on himself, on his missing self, on his inner landscape, on his internal objects. Extreme discipline, Prussian rigidity.

And so this prevents a narcissist from acting, from improvising, from acting on the fly, from being reactive to changing challenges, environments, countervailing information, and so on.

Narcissus is therefore unlikely to be moral because morality is the exercise of judgment in changing circumstances so as to restore good and to avoid or undo evil. The German phrase is gut werden machen.

And the narcissists doesn't have this.

The psychopath has the capacity for this, but doesn't care to exercise it because he holds the very question of morality in complete disdain. He holds people and the institutions they create and their societies and cultures in the most profound contempt imaginable.

The psychopath's life, as Harvey Lekley has observed, is about rejection. Psychopathy could easily be renamed Rejection Disorder, or Rejecting Personality Disorder. Psychopath rejects.

The narcissist withdraws. The narcissist avoids reality. Narcissus escapes into fantasy.

It's a rigid fantasy. He's entrapped into fantasy. He's the hostage of the fantasy and therefore is unable to act morally in changing social environments and in accordance with ever-shifting demands. He is a kaleidoscope inside, but the narcissist is never kaleidoscopic outside.

The psychopath on the other hand has the capacity to act, to play act, to pretend, to fake, and he often does. But he would never act truly morally.

Ultimately, even when the psychopath acts morally, it's bound to be for an immoral end, for an amoral goal, something devoid of morality or criminal.

The narcissist is incapable of acting morally even if he wanted to.

So in some ironic way, the narcissist is even more amoral than the psychopath, although the narcissist is less immoral and much less criminalized than the psychopath.

This is a land mental map, psychological topography that is solipsistic. The narcissist is the only denizen in his own demented fantasy.

And the psychopath is the only person endowed with rights which impose commensurate obligations of others. No one else is equal to the psychopath. No one else deserves the same treatment consideration. No one else is entitled to with the psychopath is the narcissist is also entitled but not the way the psychopath is.

The narcissist would try to cajole, to coerce, to convince, to persuade, to bribe other people, to manipulate them somehow, into providing him with what he needs under his conception of entitlement.

The psychopath would just kill people. Just simply trample over them, destroy them. He wouldn't bother to manipulate them or to, he would just go ahead and take what he wants, utterly disregarding any opposition, crashing everything in his way.

Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development was the first attempt to provide a comprehensive stage theory of moral development.

Erikson, I've dealt with Erickson in a video which I posted a few days ago, by the way. Erikson proposed an eight-stage lifespan development theory.

Colberg confined himself to moral level and relied very heavily about John Piaget's theory of moral judgment in children, some work that Piaget published in 1932.

The problem I have with both Piaget and Colbert is that their work is cognitive. They rely 100% on cognition. There is not place in Colberg's theory to emotions. It's as if emotions don't play a role in morality.

Morality is the derivative of a thinking process. Morality is a kind of decision, a kind of choice. People analyze rationally whether some behavior is right or wrong, rewarding or punishing, I mean likely to yield a reward or likely to lead to punishment.

People are very rational optimizing agents.

People are not like that. And morality is definitely not like that.

I would even venture to say that morality is much more emotional, informed much more by emotions than by cognitions, which would explain why narcissists and psychopaths don't have any morality, none whatsoever, not even a hint, not even a weep, a whiff, not even a wisp, not even a tendril of morality. Nothing there.

One of the main reasons for this is that they have no emotions. The psychopath and the narcissists are able to access only negative emotions, especially the narcissists. Envy, anger, rage, hatred, negative affectivity.

Morality is constructed on mostly positive affectivity, such as love, the emotional correlates of empathy and so.

Some negative affectivity feeds into morality, for example, righteous indignation, or emotional reactions to justice, something that Kohlberg neglected in his work, although his work is founded on the concept of justice.

In Kohlberg's work, justice is totally cognitive, which is not true. Anyone who's been in a court of law knows that justice is mostly emotional, not cognitive.

Narcissists don't do emotions, so they don't do morality, so they don't do justice, so they don't do other people, and other people's needs and wishes and dreams and priorities and preferences, and above all, other people's rights. Other people don't exist for them. They don't exist for them.

As far as a psychopath is concerned, other people are instruments or obstacles. As far as the narcissists is concerned, other people are internal objects. They're either idealized or devalued, that's all. End of story. There's nothing else.

So, Kordberg's emphasis on how one chooses, decides cognitively, rationally to respond to a moral dilemma is very lacking. It misses the element of emotion, but it also misses the element of actual action, behavioral choices.

So there's a lot to argue with in Kohlberg's work.

I want to summarize for you, Kohlberg's stages once again.

The pre-conventional level, children accept the authority and the moral code of others.

If an action leads to punishment, it must be bad. If it leads to a reward, it must be good.

There is also a sense in which decisions concerning what is good are defined in terms of what is good for us.

The conventional children believe that social rules and the expectations of other people determine what is acceptable or unacceptable behavior. A social system that stresses the responsibilities of relationships and social order is seen as desirable, and must therefore influence our views of right and wrong.

Finally, the post-conventional level. Right is based on an individual's understanding of universal ethical principles. What is considered morally acceptable in any given situation is determined by what is the response most in keeping with these universal principles.

And one could say that at the pre-conventional level, there's only the self. Norms are recognized only in line with blind egoism, with something self-oriented.

And again, because the narcissist fails to consolidate or integrate a self, fails to come up with an ego. Ego formation is disrupted.

Of course, there's a failure in stage one.

And then stage two is to see that others have goals and preferences, that your actions and choices and decisions either conform or deviate from specific norms. And again, there's a failure.

The narcissist fails to recognize the existence and separateness and externality of others, and the psychopath doesn't care about others.

Stage three is to recognize good and bad intentions.

While stage two is instrumental egoism, stage three is totally social, it's social relationships perspective, but the psychopath rejects society and the narcissist is unable to recognize its existence because it is comprised of external objects.

Stage four is to be able to see abstract normative systems, social systems perspective.

And that is, of course, beyond the ken and the capacity of psychopaths and narcissists.

Stage five is to recognize that contracts allow people to increase welfare of everyone involved. Contracts are good for everyone. It's a contractual perspective or transactional perspective.

Psychopaths don't do contracts. Psychopaths do hostile takeovers. Psychopaths do conquests. Psychopaths do invasions.

Psychopathy is externalized aggression. It doesn't contract. It's not transactional.

Narcissists are unable to transact. Even though they want to very much, and even though the shared fantasy appears artificially, superficially from the outside, appears to be contractual or transactional. It's not.

Because the narcissist interacts only with himself and with the internal objects in his mind.

So he is unable to strike a deal. He's unable to sign a contract, to commit himself to an agreement with others, because he doesn't recognize the existence of others. They are external objects beyond his ability to realize their separateness, their externality, and their agency, which gives them the right and the capacity to sign contracts.

And finally, in stage six, is to see how human fallibility and frailty are impacted by communication, mutual respect as a universal principle, the equality of everyone morally not intellectually not money-wise but morally this is of course beyond the reach of most people not only narcissists and psychopaths.

So level one is about obedience, it's about it's a punishment orientation, how can I avoid punishment.

Level two is a self or self interest orientation, what's in it for me, paying for a benefit.

Level two is conventional, so there's an interpersonal accord and conformity, social norms, the good boy, good girl attitude.

Then there's an issue of authority in stage four, authority and social order maintaining orientation, law and order morality.

Level three, the postconventional.

In the fifth stage, there's a social contract orientation.

The sixth stage is the universal ethical principles, principled conscience orientation.

So this is the picture, and this is why there is no way the narcissists or the psychopath could ever develop morality.

As I repeat, many studies demonstrated that each of the stages are cumulative. If a person understands and internalizes stage two, he or she understands the lower stages, but not the next stages. Not stage three.

So it's gradual. It's incremental. Each stage is built on the foundations of the previous stages.

Every individual progresses through the same sequence of development, but the rates of development vary.

When it comes to narcissists and psychopaths, they don't even start.

Finally, I would like to discuss William Damon's work.

American psychologist William Damon. He developed a theory that is based on Colbert. He focused and analyzed behavioral aspects of moral reasoning, not just the idea, abstract idea of justice, and rightness and fairness, but how do people actually behave?

Again, he worked with children, he was experimental. I will not go into all this.

And he made a distinction between justice and righteousness, which I think is a very important and very pertinent distinction.

According to Damon, there are six successive levels when it comes to justice.

Level one, nothing stops the egocentric tendency. The children want all the toys without feeling the need to justify their preference or to share.

The justice criterion is the wish of the self. Justice is what I want. Might is right.

According to Damon, narcissists are capable to attain this stage.

Level two, the child wants almost all the toys and justifies his choice in an arbitrary or egocentric manner.

For example, the child might say, I should play with them because I have a red dress, or they're mine because I like them.

Again, the narcissist can reach, can attain this stage.

Level three. The equality criterion emerges. We should all have the same number of toys and we should all share the toys.

This is when narcissists and psychopaths stop. They can never reach this stage. Period.

Psychopath has no concept of sharing. And the narcissist has no concept of other people. So there's no need to share. The toys and other people are all internal objects. They're all figments of a paracosm, of virtual reality, of the fantasy, of the narcissists.

And the psychopath just says the hell with it. I'm stuck in stage one and two. I never share.

Level four, according to Damon's work, is the merit criterion. Johnny should take more because he was such a good boy or because he's sick.

Level five, necessity. Necessity becomes the most important selection criteria. She should take the most because she was sick. Give more to Matt because he's poor.

Here, the rudiments of justice and more importantly fairness emerge.

Level six. The dilemma begins to come up. Can justice be achieved considering only one criterion?

The consequence is the combining of criteria.

So very often we make moral judgments and we act morally, moral behavior, based on a combination of criteria.

For example, equality and merit. Equality and necessity, necessity and merit, and so on and so forth.

Now, there are issues here of logical, cognitive operationalization, combination of many points of view, allocentrism, papa, pipa. I'm not going to all this right now.

Damon regards every human being as capable of some primitive atavistic moral reasoning.

Even psychopaths and narcissists are capable of moral reasoning, however ill-founded.

Founded on egocentric tendencies, arbitrary decision-making, self-referential rules, I am the law, I decide, I'm the found and the source of justice, I'm the arbiter, and all this.

Narcissists and psychopaths are capable of this.

And only when transition to stages three onwards north then there's a failure of narcissists and psychopaths.

So Damon is more optimistic when it comes to psychopaths and narcissists because if Damon is right and narcissists and psychopaths have attained stages one and two, there is no reason in principle why they cannot graduate to stages three, four, five, and six.

The problem with narcissists and psychopaths, according to Kohlberg and according to Vaknin, is that they never even embark on stage one. They never make it to stage one.

But Damon says it's wrong. It's not true. They do. They do make it to stage one and even two. So there's hope.

I'll let you decide. You've had experiences with narcissists. Ask yourself, who is right? Kohlberg, or Vaknin, or Damon?

Are narcissists totally devoid and psychopaths totally devoidof morality? Or have you seen the narcissists and psychopaths sometimes act morally? And you were shocked and surprised that they did.

And then if they did, what was the reasoning behind it? What led them to behave morally? Was it really totally self-interested and egotistical? Were the actions they took based on their own skewed moral reasoning where these actions totally one-sided arbitrary as I said or capricious did these actions tell you anything about the narcissist or psychopath in your lives?

This is an area, this is a field which is not very well researched. If you're about to enter the field of clinical psychology with emphasis on cluster B personality disorders, I think this is an emerging field, the morality of narcissists and psychopaths. And it has enormous implications.

Because if narcissists and psychopaths could be induced, could be somehow forced, if you wish, to develop into moral agents, if there could be some kind of catalyst that would push them to become morally competent and to act somehow morally, that would have enormous implications, social, historical, geopolitical, political, huge implications.

Because narcissists and psychopaths are everywhere. They're taking over.

We'd better find out what kind of morality they are capable of, if at all. And either take steps to defend ourselves, or somehow design a program to allow them to evolve and progress and become ultimately the moral agents which they are not and never have been.

Summary of Kohlberg's stages of moral development from the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Kohlberg, as I said, completed his work in 1958.

Level 1. Preconventional level.

At a pre-conventional level, morality is externally controlled. Rules imposed by authority figures are conformed to in order to avoid punishment or receive rewards.

This perspective involves the idea that what is right is what one can get away with, or what is personally satisfying.

Level 1 has two stages.

Stage 1. Punishment. Obedience orientation.

Behavior is determined by consequences. The individual will obey in order to avoid punishment.

Stage 2. Instrumental purpose orientation.

Behavior is determined again by consequences. The individual focuses on receiving rewards or satisfying personal needs.

Level 2. Conventional level.

At a conventional level, conformity to social rules remains important to the individual. However, the emphasis shifts from self-interest to relationships with other people and social systems.

The individual strives to support rules that are set forth by others such as parents, peers and the government in order to win their approval or to maintain social order.

Stage 3. Good boy, nice girl orientation.

Behavior is determined by social approval. The individual wants to maintain or win the affection and approval of others by being a good person.

Stage 4. Law and order orientation.

Social rules and laws determine behavior. The individual now takes into consideration a larger perspective, that of societal laws.

Moral decision-making becomes more than consideration of close ties to others. The individual believes the truths and laws maintain social order that is worth preserving.

Level 3. Post-conventional or principled level.

At the post-conventional level, the individual moves beyond the perspective of his or her own society.

Morality is defined in terms of abstract principles and values that apply to all situations and societies.

The individual attempts to take the perspective of all individuals.

Stage 5. Social contract orientation.

Individual rights determine behavior.

The individual views laws and rules as flexible tools for improving human purposes.

That is, given the right situation, there are exceptions to rules. When laws are not consistent with individual rights and the interests of the majority, they do not bring about good for people and alternatives should be considered.

Stage 6, universal ethical principle orientation.

According to Kolberg, this is the highest stage of functioning. However, he claimed that some individuals will never reach this level.

At this stage, the appropriate action is determined by one's self-chosen ethical principles of conscious. These principles are abstract and universal in application.

This type of reasoning involves taking the perspective of every person or group that could potentially be affected by the decision.

Basic tenets of Kohlberg's theory?

The numerous studies investigating moral reasoning based on Kohlberg's theory have confirmed basic tenets regarding the topic area.

Cross-sectional data have shown that older individuals tend to use higher stages of moral reasoning when compared to younger individuals, while longitudinal studies report upward progression in according with Kohlberg's theoretical order of stages.

In addition, studies have revealed that comprehension of the stages is cumulative.

Example given if a person understands stage three, he or she understands the lower stages, but not necessarily the higher stages.

And comprehension of higher stages is increasingly difficult.

Moreover, age trends in moral development have received cross-cultural support.

Lastly, data support the claim that every individual progresses through the same sequence of development, however that rates of development will vary.